BWP Ep. 2: Teachable w/ Ankur Nagpal

An early innovator in the creator economy, Ankur discusses publicly publishing Teachable’s metrics, navigating the Hotmart acquisition, the 3 best ways to serve creators, advice for founders, and more.

Everyone these days is talking about the creator economy, and how everyday people are monetizing their passions & skillsets to make a living. According to Forbes, 50 million people today already consider themselves a “creator,” and those numbers are only expected to grow.

Ankur Nagpal, the founder & CEO of Teachable, saw this coming about 6 years ago, and decided to build an online platform to help creators make and sell online courses. Teachable is where creative entrepreneurs build the future, and I’m excited to share more about Ankur’s journey.

A Conversation with Ankur Nagpal, Founder & CEO of Teachable

Teachable believes in the transformative power of knowledge. First start with telling me about your mission, and how Teachable was built with purpose from the start.

So I’ll start with a little bit of background on how Teachable got started. I’m originally Indian, and I grew up in Oman in the Middle East before moving here for college about 12 years ago. During my freshman year, I built my first business that was basically these really silly Facebook apps that help people send gifts to each other (ie: little quizzes). I just shipped them out and it was fun because it reached a lot of people, but realistically at the end of day, I looked at myself and realized it wasn’t adding true value to the world beyond just entertainment. It was good though because I cut my teeth in online business. By the end of my first summer in college, I was making 20 bucks a day online and realized that I could make real money on the internet. It basically rendered me unemployable! I knew I had to just keep building things.

Fast forward to when I graduated college, and after a year or two later I moved to New York at 23 years old with the idea of wanting to start something that was a bit more meaningful, since you know just building something that made an income wasn’t that motivating. And I started doing a little bit of teaching myself at General Assembly, and then Udemy. I had a couple of classes on Udemy, and it got to a point where we were making a couple of thousand dollars a month (!!). But then we found it really hard to scale — it’s very hard to build a business on another marketplace where we didn’t have full access to our users. No matter who we brought to the platform, they ended up buying other courses on Udemy and we never got the lifetime value of the customer. And Udemy love selling our classes for 10 bucks and we really couldn’t build a business on that. So I built the first version of what would become Teachable as a solution for us & helping our own courses scale. And what ended up happening at the same time was that Udemy angered a lot of their customers when they changed their revenue share from 70 (creators) /30 (Udemy) to 50 (creators) /50 (Udemy). So then I thought to myself… let me try seeing if other people would use this.

I spent almost six months in this in-between state of like, this is a side project but I guess there’s more customers that want to buy this. And then six-to-nine months in, I was like okay this is a real business. We’re making like $5,000 a month — I should go raise a seed round and actually start hiring people and building a team.

Oh, and the broader mission that we stumbled upon only really happened about a year and a half in. For us, it was this organic thing that developed having been creators ourselves and being teachers ourselves, and realizing that all the platforms out there were built focusing on the student. We wanted to focus on the creators, since we believe the best creators will bring students.

Why did you choose to start Teachable in NYC? How has that impacted the story & mission of your brand overtime?

I went to grad school at Cal, and this was the first time I was in the country. It was hard to separate America from California — back then (almost eight/nine years ago), it already was feeling like a monoculture. It just felt like everyone I knew was working in technology, and as much as I love technology, it just felt overwhelming where I kind of wanted to be around more interesting people. So I decided to move to New York because I had friends here, and quickly decided to stay & build Teachable.

But then as we started building a company here, I realized there’s a lot of other benefits to building in NYC as well. One very important one is around the topic of building diverse teams. I mean, yes, you can build a diverse organization anywhere, but I think the NYC lends itself to building a diverse organization much more easily. New York is a phenomenally diverse city and it’s easier to build a company that reflects that diversity.

And even now, I’m not going anywhere. I still believe in the power of cities, especially long term — cities are always going to be important. And I think it’s a little bit silly where a lot of this rhetoric about “New York being dead” is driven by people who are in their late 30s and at the age when people move out of New York anyways, so it’s it’s not an accurate representation. I still believe in cities & in New York. It’s where I would choose to live most of my life, and if I’m ever building another company, it would always be in New York.

Meagan: Btw, I totally agree — New York is here to stay & founders will keep building ❤

You’ve publicly highlighted your journey with Teachable through the “Scaling Teachable” posts on Medium (sharing revenue, sales, student numbers — since transparency is one of Teachable’s core values). Do you recommend other founders do the same? How has that been helpful in growing/scaling your reach?

For us, it’s been super helpful, but my advice to founders is to do what feels authentic to you. I’m probably an over-sharer in my life. It would just feel unnatural to run my company in any other way — like it stresses me out when I feel like I have to limit information because I have to keep track of “who have I told what” and it’s just stressful. So for me, it’s substantially easier to write publicly about our journey.

Transparency has been great for us, and I will probably always do that for any company I run for the rest of my life. I also believe transparency creates trust. I think people are afraid of the perceived things that go could go wrong with being transparent. So I think if it’s authentic to yourself, then do it.

Even after being acquired earlier this year, the internet allowed me to keep talking about Teachable and our numbers / progress publicly. But if you’re the kind of person who values secrecy and stuff in your other aspects of your life, it also would feel weird if you’re now transparent about this one. It really comes down to being authentic. I think too many people, especially executives and leadership, feel they have to act a certain way, like in being a certain level of proper for example. One of the things we’ve established in Teachable’s culture is “let’s take our work seriously, but let’s not take ourselves too seriously.” My love language is to make fun of people, so we try and keep things real in that sense. Yeah, my advice would be just don’t ever feel like you have to be a certain way or be a certain kind of proper just because your title may say you shouldn’t.

You had a fierce competitor in Hotmart down in LatAm before you joined forces with them earlier this year, allowing you to create the largest possible impact in the shortest amount of time, as you put it. How did those conversations first start? I’m sure many founders would like to know how you navigated that process. And how has Teachable changed or evolved since the acquisition?

Yeah, absolutely. So I mean we never had any strategy of being acquired when we started the business. There’s this whole idea of “build your company like you’re gonna run it forever, otherwise you might just have to,” and our goal was always to just build the largest possible business. And I was not looking to sell the company. The way it came about was actually GA (General Atlantic — growth equity firm in NYC that invests globally… also where I used to work! -Meagan).

At the time, we were putting together a fundraising round where we talked to GA, and then ended up raising that round back in 2018. But then GA reached out a few months later saying, “Hey, I have this proposition. Can you meet next week to discuss over coffee?” GA were leading investors in Hotmart (doing the same thing as Teachable, but in Latin America), and we met and they started telling us a bit about the business. My first reaction was like “I think you’re lying” because they described Hotmart’s business and the fact that this Brazilian company existed, that we had not heard of, that was about 3x our size, doubling every year and profitable — it seemed insane to me. And I was up-front being like “look I’m not interested in selling or merging the business, but they’re really impressive. I’m happy to meet with the team.” So the Hotmart team flew in, and then a couple of weeks later, we just started spending more time together — me and JP/Mateus, the founders of Hotmart — and it became very clear that we were aligned in a lot of ways. They were a founder-led, founder-driven company, and they think about the world in the exact same way. And as we spent more time together and became more comfortable with the idea, I just decided that if we’re going to do this… let’s do this. And as a result, we didn’t shop the company or run an acquisition process — I just wanted to do it and move forward with our mission, I wasn’t about trying to sell the company to the highest bidder.

So yeah, it worked out! Maybe the big reason is just because culturally we were very aligned, so the actual process was very seamless and we got a term sheet pretty fast. Any complexity was due to the international nature of the deal. Legal pain aside, I could not be happier with how it went.

One of the reasons again as I alluded to is like, especially being international & growing up internationally, I feel like one of the biases a lot of people fall into, myself included, is to believe that America is at the center of the world. And even when you live here, it certainly feels that way. But every time we talk with the Hotmart team, we realize that it’s a big, big world out there. Yes we have a good presence in the US market, we have a good presence in Brazil and Latin America, but together we can also go to the other 70% of the world we’re not talking about. So, international was a big focus of this coming together. Like everyone is sort of trying to play in one geography, and we recognize this is an international world, so let’s team up and make that a reality. Working with the Hotmart team has been really great, and together, we’re furthering our mission and impact on an even larger scale.

What has been the most effective way to help serve creators on your platform? Is it bringing people together through community? New product releases to better serve them?

We realized we wanted to help creators build the best possible student experience, so if someone buys a course on Teachable, their experience post-purchase is as high quality as possible. Things like making the interface easy, making the learning experience cool , etc.

The second part was building the best payment system for online courses and education. And what that means is, on the one hand, we’re helping increase conversion rates. We have mobile checkout & are paying out affiliates (and basically anything else that will help creators make more money), but on the other hand, we’ve also taken care of a lot of compliance stuff for our creators. So we actually had to register in the EU and pay VAT tax on behalf of people which is a giant pain, but our mantra is “let us handle all those painful things, so for a creator, they don’t have to worry about it.” Right now, we’re working with all 50 states separately to set up and file the appropriate amount of state sales taxes for our creators.

And finally, we believe if we are the CRM (like where the creators manage all of their students), that puts us in a powerful position. So we’re doing those three things — the student experience, the payments and the CRM.

The opposite of that means everything else we will just integrate with other tools. So when it comes to email marketing or building crazy landing pages for instance, we will integrate with other tools. Same with live video. We absolutely cannot do everything, and integrations help us better serve our customers.

Finding the right creators at the start that were a target for when your were starting?

Yeah, so it was very inelegant at first. It was a brute force of me cold emailing maybe 30 or 40 people a day. I would hear back from maybe 1 out of every 30 or 40 — I was doing all kinds of crazy unscalable things.

Like I remember one of our first creators was living in Connecticut at the time & was one of Udemy’s top sellers. I finally got him to agree to get on the platform, but he said “I don’t have time to actually put anything up on your site, can I send you a flash drive to do it?”… so he sent me a flash drive and I spent an entire weekend manually uploading his content and setting it up for him.

This method of reaching out & handling everything for our new clients got us maybe 10 or 15 people. After that, we built a smart tool that allowed someone to bring their Udemy account into Teachable and upload their content. And that worked really well for customers 20 to 50.

But a lot of our early acquisition was kind of inelegant — just lots and lots of outbound, and just like doing all kinds of crazy unscalable things to get any customer. Lots of manual effort.

Advice for an entrepreneur building something transformative in education? What would you like to see built?

Within Education:

I still think online education kind of sucks, and I’ll clarify, but I do think that as a society right now, our best version of online education is the same as it used to be 5 or 10 or even 15 years ago with live or recorded videos. And in my mind, like as a civilization, that kind of sucks. We’ve made enough progress in education that it should work substantially differently from how it used to. So I think we’re in this weird hybrid space where we haven’t really transformed education in any way, it’s not that different from if you were to look at a DVD training from like 20 years ago. And Teachable is actually not reinventing the educational format or what the future will look like — we’re just letting people in and giving them all kinds of tools to build & teach online.

Outside of Education:

Beyond education, the thing that I’m most passionate about, and I will probably invest in this if not build it at some point is like, is just something to make the immigrant experience better.

This country has always been run by immigrants, and one of the reasons America works is it’s this magnet for smart people from around the world to come and build. But at the same time, the immigrant experience can be pretty awful. One of the biggest win-win kind of opportunities that exists, both from a social good and capitalism perspective, is getting more smart people into the country and making sure that they have a really, really positive experience. I think that’s a space that I would like to see a lot more innovation. On a long enough time scale, if smart people stopped moving to America, that’s a problem. That’s a real problem for this country.

A huge thank you to Ankur for sharing such an authentic viewpoint on what it takes (a) to build a startup and (b) how impact is such an important piece and can be incredibly motivating. I also personally loved the thoughts on what he’d like to see built next.

To learn more about Teachable, follow them on Twitter. And Ankur too!

If you’re an entrepreneur building tools for creators, in education, or trying to improve the immigrant experience as Ankur mentioned above, please shoot me a note at meagan@lererhippeau.com. I’d love to help.

Keep an eye out for future editions of Building with Purpose, and in the meantime, let’s keep in touch on Twitter :) https://twitter.com/meaganloyst